How do we learn..to 'Know'

 Learning To Know

What does it mean to truly Know something?

Learning to know - if we are learning to gather information then we need to listen (attend), watch (attend) perceive, its an active process its embodied and emergent.

To know something is, to correspond with it. To attend as it is continuously brought into being.

For example: Perhaps to truly to know a walking trail or path means to skillfully attend to it as you traverse the landscape. In this sense the correspondence is in the perception between information that is specifying the existence of that route and your responses to it. As you correspond you attentively adjust your movements along it, deepening your perception of it, and thus again expanding your perception of it, its infinitely complex.

One could say, You come to know the path through your bringing of the path into being as you traverse along it. It is only truly the knowing of the path that creates the trace for others to follow. 'Knowledge about' the path is not sufficient to maintain its trace on the each.

It requires 'Knowledge of' The affordance of the path and the potential for knowing it contains is brought about by the repeated knowing of its potential to exist.

Without others actively searching in order to also know the path, the vary potential of that knowledge is lost to all future ramblers, without trace.

In this example knowing something, like a walking trail. Is in essence an active process. Its a process that can be attended to with the assistance of a skilled guide (a common teacher) or as a solitary search for meaning. Either way it requires the student of the trail to be fully engaged, attentive and present in learning.

What about learning a route for The future, say from a textbook or a Map?

To simple 'know about' the route does nothing to transcend that knowledge into a deeper understanding. Furthermore to share 'knowledge about the route may even create a more impoverished for of knowledge.

Despite this. that is not to suggest that knowledge about such an opportunity can not lead to empowerment of another to explore further. Yet i would encourage you to consider the frequency in which we act based on an external source.

If your purpose is to exercise your curiosity, its almost always best driven form within. If your purpose is to bank knowledge for a test, then perhaps we shouldn't be asking about what it is to Know. Here our question maybe what does it mean to retain and recall.

Even if your aim for knowledge is purely to retain it for future recall. This may have a detrimental effect. I would like to consider if to retain the knowledge in memory is perhaps something very different. Is this even a version of knowing?

Retaining this route in memory means to remove the trail from the world, to create an abstracted version of that trail, a still image, frozen in time and stored somewhere in the capacity of the mind. I suppose the question then is do you truly ever recall this memory from the past or is every attempt to do so simply the recreating of an image in the mind which is equally shaped by the context of the present, much as it would be to experience the path again walking it in the present moment. Perhaps it would always be different and shaped by your context, even if that is the context of the mind.

lets go back to our walking trail. Perhaps, you can only truly know the path as it is traversed in the present and no journey upon it will ever be an equal experience.

But with each journey lies the opportunity to perceive more and more of the path, you skillfully attune to its waypoints, the familiarity of place, shapes your perception as you to bring it into being, both path and body become one, nature and mind blurred into present experience.

This implies that learning is an active process, a point that would be difficult to argue against regardless of your theoretical underpinning. Yet in many learning environments learning still follows a didactic model of instruction where the learners are passive recipients of knowledge (Much like, empty vessels to be filled). This approach is routed in age old praxis of lecturing whereby knowledge is seen as something that can be transmitted by teachers and banked by learners.

Learning may mean different things to different cultures, but does this form of Passive learning, lead to 'Knowing' the world in any meaningfully way?